July 6, 2012

What are the sounds you hear now that will soon enough disappear into the history of lost sounds?

We remember old songs and we take the trouble to listen to music, but do we pay attention to all the sounds that form our environment, the sounds that would represent the past to us if they were gone? What is the content of the sound in the place where you are right now? Do you mask it with music? Are you uneasy when things are too quiet, or do you settle down and notice that it's never completely quiet, that there are always sounds, little sounds that emerge in the near quiet? Are you taking the trouble to love them before they are gone?

We were just noticing the sound of cracking a can open and thinking about the time in the future when that sound would not exist and how, if we were around then and heard a recording of that sound, it would be so profoundly evocative.

The sound of wood baseball bats hitting a fastball. You can tell by the pitch just how hard the ball was hit. Richie Allen and Harmon Killebrew had some of the highest pitch sounds. In recent years, Frank Thomas and Canseco. You can hear it best during batting practice or @ Spring Training. But also during a game in good seats. Aluminum makes me sad.

Here's that video I did of Meade riding a kid's bike the other day. It's almost silent, but there's detail to the sound, mostly birds. Those particular bird sounds define our neighborhood, which is also defined by relative quiet, compared to the neighborhood I grew up in, back in the 1950s, when children were always outside playing. I could go on to say something about the sadness of a child's bike without a child, but the truth is that as soon as Meade offered the bike for free there was a kid right there to take it.

Ann, what you have written is the heart of all true prayer and spiritual practice.

The great secret of spirituality from every great master in the great religious traditions is: awareness, awarenessm, awareness.

The other part of practice and prayer that we dread doing and which all of do without exception is face up to ourselves.

This take enormous courage which is simply another name for faith.

We dread silence and fill it up with sound.

Prayer is more like listening than speaking.

The great Zen master Joko Beck wrote that when you can listen and really hear the traffic, the wind, the leaking faucet the sense of hearing becomes grounded in reality, and once once sense is grounded all the senses are grounded.

Just thinking about this exact topic - one sound of summer I will never miss - the endless, shrill shrieking of small children in a swimming pool. Neighbor has pool - grandkids are over, I work at home, office window faces pool. WHY OH WHY do children have to shriek and scream on and on? Not just on entering cold water, but for the duration of the swim. Oh the pain and suffering......

"Just thinking about this exact topic - one sound of summer I will never miss - the endless, shrill shrieking of small children in a swimming pool. Neighbor has pool - grandkids are over, I work at home, office window faces pool. WHY OH WHY do children have to shriek and scream on and on? Not just on entering cold water, but for the duration of the swim. Oh the pain and suffering......"

If this were an episode of "Twilight Zone," you would get your wish and regret it.

The idea makes sense when you consider the cost of a wooden bat vs. the abuse they take in a season of play. Colleges and high school teams' costs would increase tremendously if they used wooden bats.

Fortunately, the newer BBCOR composite bats--there are few "aluminum bats" anymore--don't have that horrible "ping". They play a whole lot more like a wooden bat. They also don't splinter when you get jammed inside on a fastball.

There is a wooded trail with a creek nearby. Quite often you will hear people (almost always girls) shrieking and screeching from playing in the water. Eventually, after running out to see what the commotion is, you just tune it out and ignore the screams.

Last week, a woman was raped on that trail. She probably shrieked and screamed. And if she did, probably no one paid any attention, too many girls previously having "played wolf."

I like about every sound mentioned. Love the sound of a wooden bat hitting the ball, one of the great things about MLB.

I've always enjoyed the drone of a piston engine airplane, especially the big ones. When I was a kid I lived in the center of a horseshoe bend of the Tennesse River. Late at night I would lay in bed and listen to the Myrtle Lee, an old diesel power tug boat, chug up on side, and down the other. I couldn'l hear it at the apex of the bend as hills blocked the sound. I truly loved hearing that thing. It still plies the waters around Knoxville, but under a different name now.

Also, in the quiet of the night I could hear the chimes in the clock tower of Ayres Hall at the University of Tennessee about 5 miles away. I believe it rang the same tune as Westiminister in London. I would lay awake till midnight sometimes, just to hear the deep, resonating sounds.

Unless I'm in my car, I rarely listen to music any more. I like hearing the sounds around me.

Actually, I'm using those metal trays now. Got 'em on eBay. I have the silicone trays too, and they're nice for perfectly cubed ice, but I end up using the metal ones most. They have to thaw a little first. Yesterday I didn't want to wait and I almost broke the handle so I bashed the whole tray and they cranked right out. In little ice shards.

All the machine sounds I remember from being a kid, sitting behind the tractor on the dropper, staring up at the back of my grandfather in the driver's seat while my brother and I are dropping tobacco.

The sound of the jingling bells on the ice cream truck coming through the neighborhood. Quick!!! Hop on your bike and see if you can race around the block to catch him. Plus the sound of the playing cards in the spokes of your bike to make it sound really cool.

@ Palladian. One of my fondest elementary school memories. The smell of the mimeographed papers freshly minted and handed out.

The sound of playing cards brrrrraaapppping against bicycle spokes. Haven't heart that in decades, probably since kid's bicycles these days don't have fenders. The playing cards were held on fender stays with clothes pins.

We were without electricity for a day at my cabin in Vilas County. there was no noise. None. It was remarkable. No well pump, no refrigerator, no ceiling fans, no radio, nothing at all.

We are far from the highway, so there were no car or truck noises. No airplane noises. Just birds, squirrels, loons, and water lapping at the shore.

The lack of noise was wonderful. And it reminded me of why I sometimes wear earplugs if I'm in a mall or other noisy public place.

I miss the sound of American optimism and confidence, and knowing it was justified.

"... we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

I was in Atlanta 3 years ago, at the Fulton County Courthouse, and I heard a typewriter. It was coming from over a partition in the Probate Clerk's Office and I walked around the corner just to be sure I hadn't entered the land that time forgot. They kept the thing around so they could type a message across the back of an envelope - so that any effort to open the sealed document would be apparent from the break in the typed characters.

Nostalgia for the popping sound and then the smell of those flash cubes for taking photos.

A new sound that I will miss is the sound of the ice maker in the refrigerator dumping a load of cubes into the hopper. Sometimes we can hear it, faithfully making ice for us, in the middle of the night. It is a sound that all is well and everything is working.

Annoying sound I would like to get rid of. The damned mocking birds that go off about 4:40 am. They know a lot of different songs and sing them in randomly set patterns. Unlike other song birds where you can get the pattern down and ignore it. The mocking birds are just chaotic cacophony. The only thing to do is put a pillow over your head.

Great post by Althouse...just like sights and smells, we have aural memories and when comment is made...it tends to limit the conversation to "sounds of famous musicians or some TV character saying "Dynamite".

Not all the little but memorable sounds in each persons life. They say we remember sights and smells better that sound or tactile feel memories....but they are there.

The "ping!" a wrench made first time a stuck bolt was freed.The "pussyfarts" your second serious GF made.First time you heard an elk bugle or a tree crash...Sound of old AF military teletypes still around well into the computer age.

I have a cast iron skillet, inherited from my grandmother (good luck on breaking in and seasoning yours, BTW). I do hear it, but only a couple of times a year. Time and convenience make microwave bacon the norm in my household, for the most part. Sad, I know, but I'm not going to make it worse by lying about it.

Easy peasy. Wash first in a mild soap and water to get any industrial oils off of it. Dry with a paper towel. Heat briefly in the oven. Coat the entire think with a thin coating of vegetable oil. Bake in the oven at 350 or so for 10 minutes.

Repeat several times. Do the same thing each time you use the pan. Or as I do. After washing put it on the stove turn up the heat until completely dry. Take a paper towel with some oil on it. Rub all over the inside of the pan and let it soak in with the heat.

I'm still using my grandmother's cast iron skillets. (I'm 62 so those things are really antiques)

Easy peasy. Wash first in a mild soap and water to get any industrial oils off of it. Dry with a paper towel. Heat briefly in the oven. Coat the entire think with a thin coating of vegetable oil. Bake in the oven at 350 or so for 10 minutes.

That's a nice start, DBQ, but you and I both know (using our grandmothers') that it takes at least, oh let's say 25 years of use to really get it good and broken in...

"2)The sound of a clock ticking in an otherwise totally silent house.."

I have a Seth Thomas mantlepiece clock that I found in a trash can behind an old house when I was a kid. My grandfather cleaned it and got it running. It chimes the quarter hours. I've had it 65 years but don't have a place to put it anymore. I gave it to my younger son. They don't keep it wound.

It's kind of sad that they aren't interested in hearing it chime in the middle of the night. I always liked that sound if I was awake.

I'm getting so I hear less of all those sounds whether they are there or not.

The sound of a canvas bag of ice getting smashed with a small wooden bat to make crushed ice for mojitos. Now everybody uses an appliance for that.

On a side note while I love cast iron fry pans and cookware of all kinds one of the things I really like to cook with are carbon steel pans. They build up a nice patina, heat faster than cast iron, are lighter and easier to move around the stove. And they put a sear on meat like nobody's business.

I miss the unique sounds of winter: the crunch of walking on newly fallen snow, the rhythmic scraping of snow shovels against concrete, the whishing sounds that skis make on powdery snow, that sharp, metallic ice-slicing of sound that skates make when you turn sharply; but most of all, I miss the deadening silence during a heavy snowfall--I have not heard that in ages.

That's a nice start, DBQ, but you and I both know (using our grandmothers') that it takes at least, oh let's say 25 years of use to really get it good and broken in...

Nonsense. Start with a completely stripped pan. Strip it with a lye-based oven cleaner, (outdoors and with personal protective equipment!), then soak it for no longer than 24 hours in a 50/50 white vinegar and water solution to remove the rust. Rinse THOROUGHLY and dry it in a hot oven. As soon as you do this, you must oil and season it immediately or it will rust again.

Use flaxseed oil (from a health food store, it should be refrigerated). Use only a vanishingly small amount; put a little bit in the pan and wipe it all around so that the pan is completely coated looks dry. Turn your oven up as high as it will go, put the pan in there, then start timing 1 hour when the oven reaches its set heat. After 1 hour, turn the oven off and don't open it. After about 2 hours, when the pan is cool enough to handle, remove it. Repeat the oiling and heating process AT LEAST 6 times.

Yes, yes, it's a pain, but in the end you will have a PERFECTLY seasoned pan, better than anything that grandma could have done in 100 years.

Once the pan is seasoned, never wash it with soap. Wipe it out, or simmer a little water to loosen anything that might stick (little will), then wipe it out. ALWAYS put the pan away dry.

I miss the sound of my lil' sister screaming as I chased her around the house threatening to give her cherry belly, just like my brother gave me. I miss the circle of violence. Now she would call child services and we'd all be strangers.

Well I don't usually use bacon grease for green beans (boil in a huge pot until cooked but crunchy, plunge into cold water until cold, shake in a hot, dry pan until dry, add a huge lump of butter and sauté until hot), but of course I save it! I almost never throw anything out: bones, trimmings, skin, chicken fat, giblets... it all goes in the freezer to flavor another dish, another day.

What kind of weird, sick nostalgia perverts mourn the loss of obsolete noise?...After the hydrogen bomb, I rank the car alarm as the worst invention of the last one hundred years. I long for the day when I can wonder about what happened to those magical nights when I was awakened by a car alarm.

I miss the unique sounds of winter: the crunch of walking on newly fallen snow, the rhythmic scraping of snow shovels against concrete, the whishing sounds that skis make on powdery snow, that sharp, metallic ice-slicing of sound that skates make when you turn sharply; but most of all, I miss the deadening silence during a heavy snowfall--I have not heard that in ages.

Come to NE OH next January. We'll give you all you want as you help us clear the driveway.

My bride was recently in the hospital. I spent 3 stints in hospitals as a kid. I remember the CONSTANT pages for docs on the intercom. That is no more and I appreciate that..hospitals are quieter. As they should be.

The soft, scrape-y, plastic-y sound that I used to hear when my wife would open a new L'eggs pantyhose container in the morning. Those pantyhose really seemed sexy, back in those days. And I'd be all day thinking of helping her remove them, too.

A sound soon to be gone - along with the accompanying sense of frustration - is that combination of crinkly cellophane-type sound and the pick-pick-pick sound of my fingernail picking away at that closer-sealer sticker, as I try to open the damn wrapping around a music CD.

The phrase that newsmen used to announce an important event during a TV broadcast. I can't remember the exact wording but it was something like, "We pardon the interruption for this important news break."

It's hard to believe that before 24 hour cable news, this was how the networks announced that something important happened. At the time, this meant that a president had been shot or that we were about to be nuked. Thinking about it still aggravates me.